Um, yeah, how much do I love my dogs?

There is nothing more sad to me then a sad puppy.
Elmer has an affinity for those pull-string vibrating cat toys, like this:

I found this out because Lola had an old pull-string toy that she never played with, and when we got Elmer he became immediately attached to it. He'd carry it everywhere, holding the base of the toy in between his paws and pulling the string, over and over again. Naturally the string wore out, he chewed it to shreds and still carried it around, trying to find the string to make it "go". It was so sad and cute at the same time.
On a trip to the dollar store a while back I found a bunch of pull-string toys in their pet section so I bought three of them. But of course, as soon as Elmer got a hold of them they never lasted more than 10 minutes at most. The string would break and retract inside of the toy, resulting in Elmer searching for the string, inevitably he would try tugging on a limb of the toy over and over. Again, sad and super cute.
So for his birthday I decided to give it one more go. I went to a local pet store and bought three of those damned pull-string toys...hoping they'd last longer than 10 minutes...but they didn't.
I new I had to fix the problem of the ever-breaking favorite toy...
I dug through our puppy-toy-basket, looking for the snake that I bought a long time ago - it was a stretchy snake, a lot like this one (only purple):

I grabbed my sewing supplies, set up my machine on the dining room table, tore apart the snake, tore apart the broken toy, all the while little Elmer was at my feet, seeming to know what I was doing, and whining the entire time.
The result is a pull-string-vibrating-toy that is much more durable, and a verrrrry happy puppy.

Holy shit, do I spoil them or what?
I promise that my next post will not be puppy related.